Evaluate & Tweak

Observe and interact

I will not be able to evaluate this project in it’s entirety until we have reached Australia but there will be lots of opportunities to observe and interact with our design. I will start to list them here with details and photo’s etc. They will probably enter this page around the order that they take place.

As I mentioned before we observed our need to rest once we left England and in the end we favoured a direct route to Morocco where we thought we could relax in a warmer climate in favour of a planned stop in Rhonda. We realised however nice Rhonda may be that we would have to move on again in a few days and that is not what we needed.

We observed that we were both using our ipods on buses at times listening to similar or the same things. I have really got into Bill Mollison’s audio recordings and I planted the seed with Nina too. She asked for a copy which would mean listening to the same recordings on difference devices. Our interaction here was to buy a head phone adapter to half our energy consumption on journeys. Sometimes it’s hard to charge our ipods and so this gives us extended listening time also.

we observed that we were creating a lot of food waste from our banana skins, pea pods and orange peels. Our interaction in turning this problem into a solution was to visit the nearby beach where they take tourists on camel rides and to feed the animals which they were very happy about. Excess output into a useful input.

We observed that we will need to contact many wwoof hosts in order to get one or two offers as not everybody is always available. This could become a laborious task. To gain some leverage, using minimum effort for maximum effect we decided to produce a templete letter to send to each wwoof host we were interested in. It would then take a matter of seconds to write a comprehensive letter to each one. Our letter can be read here WWOOF intro

I observed that the same process would be benificial to my ambition of playing at some music festivals along the way. I interacted my composing a contact letter that I can just email to each festival that I am interested in. The letter can be viewed here Festival letter

I observed from writing the letter that I had no way of demonstrating my style of music. I interacted by compiling a medley to promote myself.

We observed that Nina’s needs were not being met in regard to conditions she likes for meditation. On the rooftop terrace it is noisy and windy. We harmonised by decided that I should take my morning pages to a cafe in town. This threw up the opportunity for solitude too and the chance to engage in a routine

We observed that some interactions are extremely difficult with language barriers. I do not yet speak arabic and describing the patch to fellow gardeners was nearly impossible. We interacted by printing photo’s and translating into French on the reverse to explain some of our life in England. This has proved very useful.

We observed during our check in 23 Feb that we were not fulfilling all of our needs. We were lacking nature, exercise, meaning, community, celebration and learning. Call if fate or call it destiny, we decided to head into a remote village area in the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco where we found all of the above and a whole lot more…

We observed that after our 2 weeks in Bouthrarar, building, documenting and spending intense family time we were very tired. Our interaction was to stay in Mgouna for a few days and relax, catch up on some family contact before moving on to the next stage of our journey

We observed that we had spent more time in Morocco than we allowed for so we interacted by pushing on to Fez and miss the High Atlas mountains. Although we have as much time as we want for this journey extensions can only come through free weeks wwoofing or volunteering.

We observed that once we reached Europe again after Morocco that things were going to be more expensive. The only way to interact with this problem was by turning into a solution. This meant wwoofing, couch surfing and self catering and so we changed our approach and started to plan ahead for time in cities by couch surfing and time in the countryside wwoofing.

We observed that we were carrying too much weight and we would be able to walk more and for longer by having lighter packs. We had been gifted some things in Morocco like clothes and so were carrying more than we set off from England with. Our interaction was to group together unnecessary items and post them back to Australia.